Thursday, December 03, 2009

This anthology began with an idea—the human examines, and makes art of, already-examined and already-shaped nature—and with the grand ambitions and the naiveté of first-time anthologists: this would be a collection about not only zoos but gardens, with prose as well as poetry, with writing from the earliest known instances of collecting and exhibiting animals and plants, from countries that no longer existed, written in languages that we couldn’t read.

Gardens were the first to go. That anthology would be a different one, its concerns less charged; though there is must to be written about botanical imperialism, for example, it takes considerable imagination to lament a geranium’s pot-bound existence.

These are poems writing on worse than merely tearing down paradise for the sake of a parking lot, but tearing down paradise, sometimes, for the sake of a simulacrum of paradise on the same spot. How do zoos and gardens fall into such creations? Even as Europe colonized (or attempted) the rest of the world, Victorian elements of the ‘wonders’ were deposited back home, from deepest Africa, for example, or the far east. So far, it reached, eventually, all the way to the west coast of North America, and then back into the interior. Edited by Bolster, along with Katia Grubisic and Simon Reader (who came to the project some time after it had begun), the poems range from contained, controlled to the uncontained, from snow to animal to landscape to man, but so few of these pieces really delve into the zoo as an artificial construct. As they suggest of “geranium’s pot-bound existence” in the introduction, I wonder how the editors were able to wrap their heads around such, unable to artificially produce poems that would surround an otherwise thesis (and could no one produce a poem on the mid-nineteenth century death of Jumbo in Ontario’s own St. Thomas?); is it the fault of the poems or the poets themselves?